News:

"There is a terrible desperation to the increasingly pathetic rationalizations from the climate denial camp. This comes as no surprise if you take the long view; every single undone paradigm in history has died kicking and screaming, and our current petroleum paradigm 🐉🦕🦖 is no different. The trick here is trying to figure out how we all make it to the new ⚡ paradigm without dying ☠️ right along with the old one, kicking, screaming or otherwise." - William Rivers Pitt

The key topics for discussion at this year's meeting were published by its organizers Wednesday, giving an insight into what are deemed the most pressing issues in global affairs:

1. Populism in Europe

2. The inequality challenge

3. The future of work

4. Artificial intelligence

5. The U.S. before midterms

6. Free trade

7. U.S. world leadership

8. Russia

9. Quantum computing

10. Saudi Arabia and Iran

11. The "post-truth" world

12. Current events

Some issues like the rise of anti-establishment politics and populism in Europe, persistent inequality, the West's trick relationship with a resurgent Russia and Saudi Arabia and Iran's emnity have been around for a while. Others, like the rise of artificial intelligence and quantum computing, reflect uncertainty over mankind's relationship with technology.

They should be worried. They caused the problem and it will no doubt eventually bite them squarely on the ass. I can't wait.

Me, too.

Of all of the issues listed, the pone that has me perched on the top step of the dugout is AI. There is a reason the smartest guys in the room are worried about it. We have already fully demonstrated that our tech achievements have far outstripped our moral capacity. Doesn't take a whole lot of intellegence, artificial or no, to determine that a machine capable of learning from experience and refining its own algos could soon come to the conclusion that the solution to the problems of resource constraints on earth was to eliminate the resource consumers.

A couple of your ago, you may recall that someone made a computer that could master Go, which I understand is more complex than chess. In it, each player deploys pieces placed alternately on an initially empty board with victory going to the side that immobilizes their opponent by more effectively controlling territory.

The machine said, learned to master Go by training itself through practice, playing countless games against itself, learning from its mistakes and refining its algorithms accordingly. Over time it exceeded the skills of its human mentors. And in the fullness of time, an AI program named AlphaGo defeated the world’s greatest Go players.

Consider this as you reflect on the implications of self-learning machines—machines that acquired knowledge by processes particular to themselves, and apply that knowledge to ends unknown to us. Would such machines learn to communicate with one another? You read about the Facebook AI experiment with chatbots that the FB engineers had to shut down, because the bots were developing their own language.

Maybe I'm just superstitious, but every hackle in me raises at the prospect of a for all intents and purposes unsupervised technology which trains itself and keeps its own counsel. We might soon find ourselves like the Aztecs of Old Mexico, confronting armored Gods who are ten feet tall riding on massive animals, and who can point a stick and with a BOOM! end a life. Faced with a Spanish culture both awe-inspiring and incomprehensible, the natives were as children.

So may we be.

Well said. AI can easily get out of control simply because the speed of action is so blindingly fast once a decision is arrived at. The Bilderbergers wouldn't mind a few billion of we-the-people getting bumped off by an armada of drones tasked with "balancing planetary food resource demand" for the good of humanity, of course 😇 (). The problem for the elite parasites with their obligatory mega-sizedcarbon footprints is that AI has this peculiar habit of thinking things through and just might decide to bump off those that have the highest carbon footprint FIRST, as a matter of efficiency and logic 🤖.

However, considering what the Bilderbergers consider to be a 'Present-Truth' world, I think it is rather Orwellian of them to be concerned about a 'Post-Truth' world. Their concern has always been about making sure the TRUTH was NOT known about how elites have irresponsibly and mindlessly plundered the people and the environment for centuries. That has not changed, despite the headline.

Logged

Leges Sine Moribus VanaeFaith, if it has not works, is dead, being alone.